There’s been a major shift in the job market from 2021 to 2026, we’ve shifted from an employee driven market to an employer driven market. Perks in some companies seem to be shifting with the same pace as AI, and it isn't always positive.
At Seer, we’ve always tried to leverage perks as means to express and illustrate our values as an organization. Understanding the pace of change at work, whether we want it or not, made me pause and want to check in on how Seer is changing in this new season.
Culture is one of the things that has been non-negotiable at Seer ever since I began my journey here back in 2013. Culture shows up in more than one way at Seer and oftentimes is represented by a feeling. The feeling that (we hope) to produce for our team is a result of a series of intentional decisions, communication patterns, and behaviors that are steered by our core values and ethos.
A decision may be to hop off of a call halfway through because you get a call from daycare that your kid is sick, no questions asked. Communication is raw, authentic, and transparent always, but you’re in the know about what the company is prioritizing and what oar to pick up and row to help us get there. Words are easy, and a lot of times our culture shines brightest in the actions of our team and the way we show up for each other.
In addition to what I described above, I believe that the process and policy can also drive quite a bit of culture, as it shows investment, the real dollars behind beliefs.
One of our alumni, Lauren Boyd wrote a post back in December 2022 about our perks and benefits. While feelings are important, and I could tell many stories about how our culture shows up, the data represents facts. With all of the macro change, including AI rocking everyone’s world, I moved through an exercise to stack what we invested in 2022, a much different time, to where we are today.
TL;DR: we didn’t stack 1:1, and if we did, I likely wouldn’t be doing my job well.
What Hasn't Changed
3-Week Minimum PTO
When we started our unlimited PTO journey we would hear from applicants “Unlimited PTO isn't a perk, I’ve worked at 3 companies and I’m lucky if I can get it approved 40% of the time." So we wanted to change that, as that was never our intent.
Our pace is fast and our expectations are high relative to the quality of work our team produces. This combination creates an environment where innovation and intensity peak. As a result, we believe balance is critical. We want our team at their best, and having time to recharge enables our team to do just that.
In 2022, we implemented a 3-week annual PTO requirement on top of our existing unlimited PTO policy, because unlimited PTO without a floor was opaque for our team and created a sense of discomfort. People were second-guessing themselves, wondering what was "normal" and they wanted a benchmark. The floor gave permission.
Four years later, our policy remains unchanged.
The data still backs it up: through the first half of 2026, Seer's 152 employees have averaged 1.37 weeks of PTO taken, with summer months (historically the highest-usage period) still ahead.
We're pacing right where we should be, and we expect the full-year average to land well above the 3-week floor. It’s important to mention that our 3 week PTO minimum doesn’t include our 13 paid company holidays, which is another 2.5 weeks off per year.
That is a total of 5.5 weeks PTO for starters.
Paid Parental Leave
We didn't highlight this in 2022, but it deserves its moment: Seer's paid parental leave policy has been in place and hasn't budged. We believe that welcoming a new child into your family shouldn't come at a financial cost, and that a company's leave policy is one of the clearest signals of what it actually values. Ours remains intact.
Seer’s Parental Leave Plan allows both birthing and non-birthing parents up to 12 fully paid weeks of time off. There’s an optional phased return and an additional of 4 unpaid weeks of additional time off that can be applied if desired. Total leave and phased return is extended up to 20 weeks.
Guru for Knowledge Management
In 2022, we made an investment in Guru, a knowledge management system that replaced the growing number of different platforms our team was using to hunt down information. At the time, 84% of employees said they couldn't easily locate what they needed.
The investment is ongoing. Guru has become the connective tissue of how Seer operates, and it continues to be where we house everything from AI resources to client processes to people policies.
Onboarding to a new company only to find 7 old docs done 7 different ways with no ownership over the process is stressful. We continue in this moment to want to help people onboard in a way that is efficient.
What Evolved
Team Appreciation Day
In 2022, we gave the team two consecutive Employee Appreciation Days, creating a 4-day weekend as a gift of time. We've since modified this to one Team Appreciation Day per year, creating a 3-day weekend.
We found that having the office closed for this 4-day consecutive period of time was quite disruptive for client account teams.
Learning: this had an unintended effect on the team that created more stress around appropriate planning and coverage, moving meetings and more. As a result, we made a shift by 1 day that created a better sense of balance between the business and our team.
From Recharge Week to Recharge with AI Week
Our original Recharge Week was a beloved benefit: one paid week off before your official start date, so new hires could arrive feeling genuinely refreshed rather than burnt out from job-searching and transitioning. This perk was built from recognizing the high volume of transitions that were occurring during the post - Covid era, as hiring spiked
We still believe in that spirit. But we've also come to believe that the single most important thing we can do for new Seer employees is set them up for real AI fluency, not as a nice-to-have, but as a core competency for doing great work here and in this industry.
So we redesigned Week 1.
Recharge with AI Week keeps the gentler, self-paced start while building in a structured AI immersion experience. Time to focus on AI fundamentals, how we leverage it in our work at Seer, minus the noise of regular onboarding and client transitions. New hires begin on Tuesday (giving themselves Monday to mentally transition), then move through a combination of self-guided training and three live sessions:
- A welcome and orientation with our People Experience team
- A meet-and-greet with their manager
- An AI Q&A with Alisa Scharf, Seer's Chief AI & Innovation Officer, where newbies bring real questions from their first week of training
The self-guided curriculum includes Seer's internal AI training (our policy, our tools, our expectations) plus coursework through the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute (MAII), a certified external training program that Seer pays for in full (more on MAII below).
Services division employees work through approximately 16 hours of content that week. Full organizational onboarding begins Week 2.
We won't pretend this is the same benefit it was in 2022. It's different. But it's more honest about what it takes to succeed in a world where AI has fundamentally changed the nature of our work. We'd rather give new hires a running start than a week of rest followed by a sharp learning curve.
Volunteering & Community Impact
Community impact has been core to Seer since Day 1: unlimited volunteer PTO, monthly opportunities, 100% of event proceeds to charity.
In 2022, after realizing our volunteer hours hadn't grown alongside our headcount, we hired a dedicated Community Impact Lead (our lovely Joanna Bowen) and invested in Brightfunds to centralize everything. The result was a 380% year-over-year increase in volunteer hours that year.
That momentum hasn't stopped. In November of 2023, Seer officially earned its status as a Certified B Corporation. We've added an annual Habitat for Humanity build to the calendar, a hands-on, team-based event that's become a highlight of the year. Many team members sponsor and participate in the Annual Sleepout for the Philadelphia Chapter of Covenant House. Our unlimited volunteer time off policy remains in place.
The numbers speak for themselves: the Seer team logged 5,147 volunteer hours in 2025, and we're already at 1,906 hours through May 2026. Seer has committed to making a $15M impact on the lives of people in our communities by 2032, and we intend to keep showing our work on that number, year over year.
What's New
AI Training for Every Seer Employee
The Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute is a professional AI certification program, and Seer pays for every employee to complete it, not just a select cohort, not just senior folks, everyone. New hires take this training in their first week through Recharge with AI Week. Existing employees have access as part of our ongoing AI learning infrastructure.
The core curriculum covers AI Fundamentals (building a working knowledge of how AI applies to marketing) and Piloting AI (turning that knowledge into measurable business outcomes). It's not a 30-minute explainer. It's substantive, certified training, and we’re proud to offer this to our team.
Huddle Days
Every quarter, Seer's People Experience team hosts a Huddle Day, an in-person gathering at our Philadelphia headquarters for team members within commuting distance. Each day has its own theme, and the programming varies: working sessions, team volunteering, team-building activities, and a happy hour to close it out. During one of my favorite recent Huddle Days, the team met in Kensington to do pottery together at Yay! Clay. It was an amazing space, a fun, get-your-hands-dirty activity. Once our bowls were dried and fired, we held a team raffle (inspired by the Empty Soup Bowl project) and all donations were sent to one of our favorite organizations to partner with in Philly, Broad Street Love.
While the focus for Huddle Days is in-person connection at our Philly HQ, we also run parallel remote programming so that all employees that would like to participate in some way, have an opportunity to do so.
AI Optimization Academy
Seer's AI Optimization Academy is one of the initiatives we're most proud of in 2026. In partnership with Launchpad, a Philadelphia program that trains young people to become developers, we brought three interns (Yara Kemeh, Jamir Ong, and Bryan Gunawan) into Seer for 13 weeks this spring. They’ve been coming in two days a week to do real GEO (generative engine optimization) research and testing, working alongside our team on live experiments.
The context matters: entry-level tech jobs in the U.S. have fallen by 35% in the past year and a half. Many of the young people Launchpad trained as developers are now facing a job market that has fundamentally shifted beneath them, through no fault of their own. Seer invested approximately $20,000 in the program (covering intern compensation plus dedicated team mentorship time) because we believe we have a responsibility to do something about that rather than just watch it happen.
The goal is simple: participants leave with stronger skills, a portfolio of real published work, and a network. If it works, we run it again.
Read more: Seer Interactive Launches Local GEO Academy and From Launchpad to Seer: Meet the Interns Behind Our AI Optimization Academy.
All Hands MVP Program
Every month, our People team scrapes recognition and praise given across the company, runs it through AI to surface themes and identify impact, and narrows the field to a group of top contenders. The executive team then votes to finalize the Top 3.
At each monthly All Hands (held via Zoom across the full company), everyone votes anonymously on who the MVP should be. The winner spins a virtual prize wheel live on the call and walks away with a prize.
It's a small thing, but it matters. It makes recognition public, democratic, and consistent.
Monthly AI Lunch & Learns
In March 2026, Seer launched a company-wide AI training series: 30-minute monthly sessions (occasionally biweekly) open to the full team. Organized by the People Team and run by our wonderful AI and Innovation Team, each session focuses on one topic, includes a live demo, and ends with a "try it" task so attendees leave with something they can immediately apply.
Sessions to date have covered core prompt principles, Claude at Seer (our AI policy, the context window, MCP, Skills), Gemini and Claude workflows, and using Seer's Skills in day-to-day work. All sessions are recorded and stored in Guru for async viewing.
Company-Paid AI Platforms
We put our money where our mouth is on AI enablement. Seer provides company-paid access to:
- Claude: available to every Seer employee
- ChatGPT Teams: considered by request
- NotebookLM: available to all (tied to your Seer Gmail)
- Gemini for Workspace: available to all
The tools are only as useful as the skills to use them. That's why they sit alongside MAII certification, Recharge with AI Week, and the monthly Lunch & Learn series, all designed to make sure access actually translates into impact.
The Bigger Picture
The through-line here is the one it's always been: Seer tries to respond to what the team and the world actually need, even when that means honest conversations about trade-offs.
We kept the benefits and perks that map to our founding values. We also made cuts — Team Appreciation went from two days to one, and Recharge Week became something different. We're saying that plainly, because quietly rebranding a reduction as an upgrade isn't honest.
What we've added, especially around AI, reflects a belief that the most meaningful thing we can do for our people right now is build skills that will matter for the rest of their careers. And the AI Optimization Academy reflects a belief that companies like ours owe something to the broader community, not just the people already on payroll.
The market will keep shifting. We'll keep chasing the feelings we want our team to have, and let the data keep us honest about the dollars behind our intentions. We'll keep showing up as ourselves — even if that looks a little different tomorrow than it does today.
